An Interview with a Tiananmen Mother: You Weijie’s Lifelong Fight for Truth and Justice in China
By Gong Jiangyu
Editor’s Note: In honor of the 36th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989, Human Rights in China shares this profile of You Weijie, a member of the “Tiananmen Mothers,” translated into English by the author for the first time. The original article was published in Wainao on December 9, 2024.
When a train on Line 1 of the Beijing subway approached Tiananmen Square, You Weijie lapsed into quiet reflection and remembrance.
As always, Beijing’s subway was teeming with passengers, reflecting the city’s congestion and relentless pace. Elderly faces were few and far between. Standing in the aisle, 71-year-old You gripped the handrail tightly, steadying herself against the train’s jolts and sudden stops. She had visibly aged. Her once-thick hair had thinned, and if you looked closely, a faint streak of white emerged from within.
You’s gaze moved past the faces around her—mostly young professionals and students—and settled on something far more distant: a memory from 35 years ago. In 1989, the death of Hu Yaobang, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, ignited over a month of pro-democracy protests in Beijing. Students filled Tiananmen Square, calling for freedom and an end to corruption.
The movement ended in a brutal military crackdown between the night of June 3 and the early morning of June 4, when the government deployed troops and tanks to suppress the protests. Due to the authorities’ strict news blackout, the exact number of deaths and injuries remains unknown. Official figures claim that “more than 200 people died, including 36 university students,” while independent estimates put the civilian death toll somewhere between several hundred and several thousand.
Yang Minghu, You’s husband, was one of the victims.
Yang was shot in the early hours of June 4 and subsequently taken to Beijing Tongren Hospital. He survived for two days under emergency treatment—long enough to recount to his wife, in brief, what had happened. According to You, he was shot near Nanchizi Street.
Thirty-five years later, You guided the reporter back to that very spot, not far from the Tiananmen Gate Tower. Looking west along the red imperial wall, one could just make out the silhouette of Tiananmen in the distance.
“There,” she said, after emerging from Tiananmen East Station, pointing across Chang’an Avenue to the gate of the Ministry of Public Security headquarters. “He (Yang Minghu) told me that the People’s Liberation Army soldiers had just come out from the Ministry of Public Security and opened fire on the crowd on the opposite side the street.”
Now, 35 years have passed. Although the bloodstains are no longer there, the shadow of that night has never lifted. Tiananmen, as the symbolic “heart” of the Republic, remains gripped by an uneasy fear—its air still tight with anxiety. All around, dozens of uniformed police officers and armed soldiers stand guard.
The authorities have been tightening security in the Tiananmen area for several years, not just on June 4th each year. Within just a few hundred meters of the spot where Yang was killed, there are now two ID checkpoints. You remarked to the reporter, more than once, that the atmosphere feels even more tense than in previous years. The heightened surveillance made her visibly uncomfortable. She tugged at the reporter’s arm and urged him to leave quickly.
“I haven’t come to Tiananmen in many years,” You said. “This place brings me too much sorrow.”
In 1991, the year after the massacre, You met Ding Zilin and Zhang Xianling, whose sons had also been killed by army gunfire. Together, the three women began a journey that would span over two decades—seeking out other victims’ families, recording their testimonies, and exposing the state’s cover-up of the death toll. According to the Tiananmen Mothers website, by August 2011, the confirmed list of the dead included 202 names.1
In the late 1990s, as more and more victims’ families came forward, they began calling themselves the Tiananmen Mothers—a name inspired by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo2, a group of parents who had also lost children during Argentina’s military dictatorship.
The group put forward three enduring demands: truth, accountability, and compensation. They have upheld these demands for decades, yet the authorities have consistently refused to acknowledge their existence. According to Voice of America (VOA), in 2011, government officials held two private meetings with an unnamed victim’s family member, but proposed only financial compensation. In a public letter, the Tiananmen Mothers declared that they sought open dialogue—not backroom deals—and firmly rejected all efforts to “settle the matter quietly.”
Instead, the state’s “responses” to them have taken the form of escalating surveillance and silencing. Their phones are tapped. Plainclothes police monitor their homes. They are barred from meeting journalists. Some have even been forbidden from leaving the country.
You said that in the two months leading up to this year’s June 4 anniversary, journalists from three foreign media outlets attempted to visit her home, but were intercepted by police. Around the same time, her WeChat account was also blocked.
Annual Memorial Ceremonies
Fragrant Hills Park, famed for its beautiful scenery, is nestled in the northwestern suburbs of Beijing. Every autumn, its brilliant red maple leaves draw throngs of visitors. Few, however, are aware that at the park’s southwestern foot lies Wan’an Cemetery—the resting place of eight victims of the Tiananmen Massacre.
In the first few years after the massacre, when victims’ family members visited the cemetery, they would place flowers not only on the graves of their own loved ones, but on those of others as well. Zhang suggested that, since everyone wished to pay tribute, they should do it together. By the late 1990s, some victims’ families began holding joint memorials every June 4th, a tradition that continues to this day.
They did not attract the authorities’ attention at first. Zhang remembers that in the beginning, even journalists were able to enter the cemetery to photograph the memorials. Later, plainclothes officers began to confiscate their cameras. Eventually—over a decade ago—reporters were barred entirely. Surveillance measures have since grown steadily more stringent. Today, the families must film the ceremonies themselves.
On the 35th anniversary of the massacre, the remote cemetery—ordinarily quiet and little-visited—was placed under heavy security. According to the reporter’s observation, more than a dozen uniformed and plainclothes officers were stationed at the entrance, flanked by two police cars with lights flashing continuously. All bereaved families were required to travel to the site in the morning by police vehicles.
A video released by media showed six family members of Tiananmen victims gathering at the grave of Yuan Li on June 4 to hold a joint memorial ceremony. You, speaking on their behalf, read a memorial address in which she declared: “We will persevere—firmly, and without ever giving up.”
“As to the political disturbance that occurred in the late 1980s, the Chinese government has long reached a clear conclusion,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning said in response to questions from foreign reporters on June 4, 2024, “We are firmly opposed to anyone using this as a pretext to attack and smear China and interfere in China’s internal affairs.” However, these remarks were not included in the official transcript of the press conference published on the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs website that day.
“Doesn’t that mean they said nothing at all?” You said angrily after watching it. Deeply disturbed, she only watched the first half of the video.
When the Tiananmen Mothers group was founded, You was still a young technical worker and did not participate in the early efforts to find and document victims. Now long retired, she has gradually taken on more responsibility within the group, especially as Ding and Zhang have grown older. Since 2014, You has stepped into a leading role.
Memories of Yang Minghu
When the reporter first visited You’s home inside the Second Ring Road of Beijing, her living room appeared messy and disordered: tapes, plastic sheets, and scissors lay strewn across chairs and the white-tiled floor. On the sofa rested a black-and-white photograph of her husband, its surface marked by time—irregular water stains etched like silent scars of the years.
“This is the 35th year now. I want to tidy up my husband’s photo,” she said, before retreating into the bedroom to put on a neatly pressed jacket. Then, sitting on the living room sofa, she began to revisit her memories.
You was born in Beijing in 1953. Just after she graduated from primary school, the Cultural Revolution erupted, cutting short her education. In the third year of the movement, she joined the “Down to the Countryside” campaign and was sent to a military-style work corps in Tieli, Heilongjiang Province—a city in China’s far northeast—to perform manual labor.
Before leaving, the propaganda she saw portrayed Northeast China as a land of plenty, a paradise of material abundance. But upon arrival, the reality of harsh living conditions triggered her first doubts about the government. Still, shaped by the intensity of youth, she still described life in Northeast China as a “youthful dream.” The images remain vivid: her camp stood beside endless stretches of soybean and wheat fields, so vast it would take a day to walk across them. In winter, thick mist would gather above a small river winding out from the birch forests, hanging in the air like a ribbon of jade.
After the Cultural Revolution, she made her way back to Beijing and began working in a laboratory at the Beijing Printing and Dyeing Factory, where she was responsible for quality control. During this time, she enrolled in a workers’ university to study textile dyeing and printing.
When 30-year-old You first met Yang through a friend’s introduction, she was immediately impressed by the gentle, bookish man wearing spectacles. “I wanted to find a partner who was educated,” You said. “The moment I saw him, I could tell he was deeply scholarly, exactly the kind of person I was looking for.”
The Cultural Revolution deprived You of the opportunity to continue her education, a loss she still carries with regret. As a result, she sincerely hoped that her partner would be someone well-educated. Yang, for his part, was a member of the “Old Three Classes”3—students who had graduated from senior high school before the Cultural Revolution began.
You recalled that during the Cultural Revolution, Yang returned to his hometown in Zhejiang Province and taught at a local primary school. During this period, he insisted on learning English, with the only other participants being children of senior party officials. In 1977, Yang took part in the first national college entrance examination after the Cultural Revolution and was admitted to Tsinghua University to study mechanical engineering. By the time he met You, he had just graduated.
“I deeply admired his commitment to learning,” she said. She also cherished his beautiful handwriting, both in Chinese and English.
“He was the first person I truly got to know deeply,” You recalled. Although she had tried some blind dates through friends’ introductions before, she felt nothing for any of them. Just six months after meeting Yang, in September 1983, the two got married.
Their married life was simple. The household income was not high, with their combined salaries totaling about one hundred yuan. Although the Reform and Opening-up brought great development to China’s economy, You felt that she “did not experience the benefits of the era.” In 1989, their household income had yet to see any meaningful increase.
One year after they married, their son was born, and the couple devoted all their energy to raising him. It was a quiet but joyful time. You and her husband often rode bicycles separately, placing their child on the side racks of their bicycles, and took him to nearby parks. They both believed in the idea of letting children grow up in nature.
In the years that followed, You remained in her job at the dyeing factory, while her husband changed positions frequently. As a result, more of the responsibility for childcare fell to her. At times, she would complain to him that the burden of housework was unfairly hers, but the tension always passed quickly. “Mothers always take on more of the care for the home and children. It’s in their nature,” You said.
Meanwhile, around them, China was undergoing change. The severe social and economic inequalities brought about by the Reform and Opening-up were beginning to have a significant impact on society. Contradictions were gradually accumulating.
“They are Patriots”
In You’s memory, when the movement in 1989 broke out, she cared about and supported the student movement much more than her husband. When the demonstrations sparked by Hu’s death began, Yang was going through a difficult job transition. He was more focused on his new position at the Trade Promotion Council than on the protests outside.
In early May, Yang left for a business trip to Guangzhou, placing him far away from the epicenter of the student movement. Meanwhile, You, still in Beijing, witnessed the surging crowds on the streets and followed the unfolding events with close attention.
At the time, her factory was on break for equipment maintenance, so You had her days free. Many times, after dropping off her child at kindergarten, she would visit Chang’an Avenue or Tiananmen Square whenever she had time. Although she did not actively participate, she deeply sympathized with the students involved in the movement. In her view, the slogans calling for “anti-cronyism” and “anti-corruption” had already become a shared public conviction.
You also wanted her child to experience the atmosphere of the movement. One morning in early May, she rode her bicycle with her four-year-old son to the edge of Tiananmen Square so he could glimpse the gathering crowds. When they reached the road between the History Museum and the Ministry of Public Security, the area was packed shoulder to shoulder with protesters, and she could only push her bicycle forward on foot.
Seeing many people donating to the students, she also gave her son two yuan and encouraged him to deliver it to a student in the square. “Looking back, I think I was very naïve at that time,” You recalled. “I was trying to teach him and give him a sense of society. At that time, I believed in letting the child understand society through many different aspects.”
“My child asked me, ‘Mom, what are they doing?’ I replied, ‘They are patriots.’”
Even now, a trace of fear remains. You sometimes wonders whether that impulsive act might have exposed her son to danger.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to China prompted students to escalate their protest, launching a hunger strike on May 15. Around that time, You witnessed scenes of profound civic solidarity at the Guangqumen overpass, not far from her home. Citizens were flagging down passing vans and handing over homemade meals for the students in Tiananmen Square. “All the drivers would stop as soon as someone waved them down,” You recalled. She too brought soda from home and gave it to the drivers to deliver.
On May 18—the day before martial law was declared in Beijing—Yang returned from his business trip to Guangzhou. He had not yet encountered the tense atmosphere gripping the capital. Only then did the couple begin to seriously discuss the student movement and share their views. You recounted what she had seen and heard over the previous days and passionately voiced her support for the students. Yang listened silently.
“I was the one doing most of the talking—his attention was still focused on work,” You remembered. Meanwhile, she took her husband to the Guangqumen overpass so he could witness the citizens delivering food with his own eyes.
Yang’s return coincided with a rapid deterioration in the situation. After martial law was declared on May 19, You saw residents building barricades at the Guangqumen overpass—one blockade even included a public bus. She overheard people saying, “We absolutely can’t let the army reach Tiananmen Square.”
“No one was ordered to do this. Everyone acted on their own, out of a shared desire to protect the students,” she said.
But with her husband’s return, You no longer went to the square as frequently. Instead, she spent more time with him. Around May 20, on an errand to his workplace, she passed Tiananmen Square for the last time.
At that moment, You remembered, support for the students seemed universal—even state-run media were voicing sympathy. She never imagined that a massacre was about to unfold.
“The Soldiers Opened Fire”
“Wake up, wake up—something’s happened! They’re shooting!” Yang shook You awake. In the early hours of June 4, he had been startled from sleep by the distant crack of gunfire. The two of them heard voices gathering outside; neighbors were congregating below. They hurried downstairs. A neighbor who had just returned from Xidan told them he had seen pools of blood on the ground.
“Has anyone been to Tiananmen Square?” You anxiously asked those who had returned. “No one dares,” came the reply. You was deeply worried about the students in the square and wanted to take her husband there, but someone stopped her, reminding her that her child was still at home.
“I’ll go,” Yang said. “You stay here and look after our child.” Then he got on his bicycle and rode off.
As soon as her husband left, You was filled with regret. A sense of dread washed over her, but there was nothing she could do. She remained downstairs, unable to sleep. Around 3 a.m., she heard another burst of gunfire—directly this time. Later, she would come to believe that it was likely during that volley that her husband was shot.
Her anxiety deepened. She wanted to search for him but had no idea where to begin. She returned home to check on her child.
By 6 a.m., Yang had still not returned. You went downstairs again, pacing around the building, not knowing where to look.
“It’s been hours,” she thought. “He should be back by now.” In her worry, she even forgot to lock the door.
As she was climbing the stairs again, a young man—barely in his twenties—stopped her.
“Are you You Weijie?” he asked. The young man had been sent by Yang. He had gone to their home, knocked on the door, and—finding no answer—pushed. The door opened. Inside, he saw a child sleeping alone and realized You must still be nearby.
He told You that Yang was at Tongren Hospital. A van had brought six or seven wounded people there. By the time they arrived, only two were still alive. One more died on arrival at the emergency room. Yang was the sole survivor.
After leaving her child with a relative of Yang’s, You rushed to the hospital. The emergency room was crowded with the injured, but Yang was not among them. She continued searching and eventually learned that her husband was in the operating room. At that moment, a neighbor found her in the hospital to tell her that her home had flooded—water had filled the entire building.
At 10 a.m., Yang was wheeled out of the operating room. The doctor told You he had sustained a comminuted fracture. “There’s nothing more we can do,” they said. You didn’t fully grasp what that meant. Seeing that her husband was still alive, she ran home to deal with the burst water pipe. To this day, she does not know why it ruptured at that moment. None of the neighbors ever mentioned it again; instead, they silently split the cost of the water bill among themselves.
“He was wounded in his bladder, which was shot to pieces, and his pelvis was shattered,” You would later recount in testimony.
On June 5, a doctor informed You that Yang urgently needed a blood transfusion. But others at the hospital said that the martial law troops had prohibited hospitals from supplying blood to wounded civilians. No one could access the blood bank. She had to find blood herself.
You went out to the street, trying to ask strangers for help—but she was too shy, too introverted, unable to speak. Just then, the doctor came out and, seeing her frozen, began calling out on her behalf: “Her husband is injured—can anyone donate blood?”
Soon, over ten people volunteered for blood testing. Four turned out to be a match and all four donated blood for Yang.
But it was already too late. By the time doctors began the transfusion, his condition had worsened. “He was bleeding even as they tried to give him blood,” You said. At 8 a.m. on June 6, Yang died of heart failure caused by intra-abdominal infection.
You wasn’t in the room when it happened. She was crying in the hallway. “I couldn’t bear to watch him die,” she said. “If I saw it, I would never forget it for the rest of my life.”
In the two days before Yang’s death, following the doctor’s advice, You did not talk much to her husband, so she never learned the full details of how he had been shot.
Relatives brought their child from home to see his father for the last time. Many years later, when You asked her child if they had any memory of his father, the child said he remembered the burned trolleybus on the street.
As You walked out of the hospital, she saw armed soldiers patrolling nearby. She had an impulse to ask them why they had opened fire on civilians, but she held her tongue—for her child’s sake.
The company where Yang had worked held a small funeral for him. Only a few colleagues and relatives came. You remembered that she didn’t say a word the entire time. She was blinded by grief and didn’t know what to say. She just cried, and scattered flowers over his body.
At the time, You was 36 years old and her son was 5. Her life had been shattered beyond recognition.
“We Have the Same Fate”
The memory of her husband began to haunt You. Whatever she was doing, she could not stop thinking about the massacre—and about her husband’s death.
“Why did something like this happen in China? And who am I?” she kept asking herself again and again.
“I don’t even know whether I’m a citizen of this country,” she told her supervisor, refusing to return to work. The factory where she worked sympathized with her and allowed her absence but continued to pay her salary as usual until she was asked to return to work three months later. Yang’s workplace also offered her a “condolence payment” of 800 yuan.
You did want to return to work. Only work could keep her from the painful memories. She couldn’t allow her mind to go still, not even for a moment. At the same time, she redirected all her energy into raising her child. After Yang’s death, the burden of parenthood fell entirely on her shoulders.
It took her a full year to regain her footing. She never touched the 800 yuan in compensation, and, a year later, returned the money to Yang’s former employer. “I am not only his wife, but also a citizen of this country,” You told the company’s leader and insisted on giving back the money, which exceeded her annual salary. Only then did she feel a measure of peace.
“I couldn’t use that money,” You said. “Because it was a life. Eight hundred yuan could never replace a person’s life.”
At first, You kept Yang’s urn at home. But soon, she noticed something unusual about her child. Each time he returned home, he would announce, "I'm back." When she asked him why, he said he was "talking to the furniture friends." Whenever You tried to leave the house, her child would grow visibly anxious.
A month later, You took the urn to Wan’an Cemetery, where she saw two young people’s urns placed prominently on the shelf. They had also died on June 4, 1989. She immediately realized that they were also victims like her husband: one of them was Wang Nan, Zhang’s son, who died at the age of 17; the other was Yang Yansheng, Huang Jinping’s husband, who died at the age of 30.
Zhang later recalled that she had deliberately chosen a niche near the corridor, at eye level, and placed an enlarged photo next to it. "So people would see it!" she said, her voice full of emotion. She had achieved her goal.
On Tomb-Sweeping Day and the anniversary of Yang’s death, You saw the two urns again and again when she visited Wan’an Cemetery to pay tribute. One year later, she suddenly felt the urge to meet their families.
On Tomb-Sweeping Day in 1991, when You visited Wan’an Cemetery again, she finally plucked up the courage to leave a note with her name and phone number in the niche holding Wang’s urn.
Soon after, Zhang saw the note and called You to invite her to her home. You hesitated again. She feared she would not be able to face the grief if they met, so she did not go.
But at the end of the year, You received a letter from Ding, in which Ding talked about her child who had also died in the Tiananmen Massacre at the age of 17. That letter made You finally decide to meet them. During the following Spring Festival, the three women gathered at Ding’s home, and the small group was officially formed.
Ding and Zhang began a search that continues to this day. The number of victims they identified steadily grew. In an interview with Initium Media, Zhang described the work as “gathering evidence” and “verifying the truth.”
However, You, who was still relatively young at the time, did not participate in the search activities. Ding and Zhang knew that she worked at a state-owned enterprise and was raising a young child alone, so did not involve her too much in the group’s activities. In the early years, You only attended the group’s occasional meetings. But after she added her name to a collective petition, the police showed up at her door in 1993.
"I wasn’t afraid," she told the reporter, firmly. "I believed what I was doing was right. I didn’t feel I had done anything wrong." She flatly rejected police demands that she stop signing petitions.
The Founding and Growth
Over the next two decades, You remained a quiet figure in the group. Apart from signing the annual open letters, she did not participate in any other activities. But the Tiananmen Mothers continued to grow: from just over a dozen members in the 1990s to more than two hundred by the 2010s. More and more relatives of victims gathered.
Ding and Zhang had been the leaders since the Tiananmen Mothers was founded, but as they grew older, they realized they could no longer manage the group on their own. With the dream of “redressing the Tiananmen Massacre” still distant, they began to consider finding “successors.” With their support, a service team composed of several younger members was formed.
In the summer of 2013, You received a call from Ding, asking her to come to a house in the suburbs of Beijing. At first, she did not know what it was about, but when Ding asked her to take on more responsibilities within the group, she agreed without hesitation.
Zhang recalled that after You was chosen to take charge of the group, even a national security officer expressed doubt: “You handed things over to Mrs. You? Is Mrs. You really up to it?”
“Why not? Everyone learns by doing!” Zhang shot back.
Still, not everyone supported the decision. Some in the group doubted You’s strength, saying she was too passive—that she went to the police whenever asked. Zhang called her directly: “You don’t have to comply with everything the police demand of you. You haven’t broken any laws.”
From then on, You no longer went to the police station. When summoned for a “talk,” she told officers to come speak with her downstairs at her apartment.
Another member of the service team, Li Xin *(name changed), also said that at first, the work in the group was very difficult for You due to her lack of experience. “She wasn’t as polished as the older generation. But she was committed,” Li said.
That autumn, You organized several small teams to travel across the country to visit the victims’ families in different regions.
The following year, at Ding’s insistence, You’s signature was placed first in the open letter for the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre.
After the open letter was drafted, You began to notice that every time she left her house, whether for shopping or visiting friends, there was always a “tail” behind her. When she took out her phone to take a photo, the plainclothes officer would turn away.
After her interviews with other victims’ relatives were published in foreign media, she was summoned by the police again. You recalled that she had an intense argument with the police that day. “Neither side was willing to back down,” You said. She stayed at the police station for over eight hours.
Later, You reflected that in 2014, —her first year leading the group—was also the year police threats against her were most aggressive, likely intended to scare her off. From then on, the police’s attitude began to soften.
Since 2015, every year before June 4, she has been taken out of Beijing on a forced “tour.”
Still, she continues to give interviews during the Tiananmen anniversary, and is often seen as the group’s “spokesperson.” She resists that label, saying that they are not an organization and don’t speak for anyone.
Even in interviews, she remains cautious. Sometimes she retracts her words or asks reporters to blur what she’s said. “I’m not a dissident,” she explains. “I just hope the government will face the victims' demands seriously.”
Still Waiting and Persisting
Zhang recalled meeting You for the first time: “She looked haggard, spoke softly, and had little social experience.” Over the following twenty years, Zhang still saw her as introverted and quiet. Li remembered that when they first worked together, You spoke with a stammer, her words unclear, her southern accent pronounced.
However, during interviews, she now speaks with clarity and noticeable confidence.
Two years ago, You began practicing the piano. She now learns a new piece each week to keep her mind sharp. “The pressure is on me,” she explained. “This country’s refusal to resolve this has made it my responsibility.” In addition, she also practiced yoga and square dancing. When she was taken on a forced “tour”, even the police remarked on her physical strength.
When speaking about recent events such as the Hong Kong anti-extradition protests and China’s three-year zero-COVID policy, You shook her head. “I’ve already lost hope,” she said. Since 2020, Hong Kong authorities have banned the candlelight vigil in Victoria Park that had been held annually for three decades.
Over time, the ranks of the bereaved have thinned. Since the first death in 2017, seventy-three family members have passed away.
Regardless, You remained determined to persevere. “No one can accept a government ordering the military to kill its own people,” she said. “I hope the government will confront this. It cannot be avoided.”
“Because we are citizens. We have the right to freedom. This land is not a gift from those in power. Everyone who has lived on this land for generations is entitled to that right.”
More than thirty years ago, You wrote to Ding, saying they would one day lay flowers at the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square—when the truth of June Fourth is finally revealed. She is still waiting for that day.
And when that day comes, she said, she will place advertisements in the newspapers to find the citizens who once donated blood to Yang—and thank them in person.
(At Li Xin’s request, her name has been changed.)
You Weijie said that the number of victims found by the Tiananmen Mothers group should be 203, and one victim has not been made public on the website.
From 1976 to 1983, the Argentine Military Government carried out widespread repression of dissent, a period known as the “Dirty War.” It is estimated that between 7,000 and 30,000 people went missing during this time.
“Old three classes” refers to the high school graduates from 1966 to 1968 who, due to the Cultural Revolution, participated in the “Down to the Countryside” Movement and were unable to pursue higher education. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, these three cohorts were allowed to take the college entrance exam despite being older than the usual age for university applicants.